In the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
while much of the country was still stunned and
grieving, Michelle Cottom was being forced to deal
with an ugly bottom line. How much was her child’s
life worth?

The Cottoms — and the families of 41 other victims —
may soon get an answer as the little-noticed
lawsuits they have brought against the airlines,
security companies and other parties move toward a
trial in a Manhattan courtroom.

Mrs. Cottom’s 11-year-old daughter, Asia, a
passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, died when
hijackers crashed the plane into the Pentagon. She
and her husband, Clifton, soon had to choose between
taking what they perceived as a minimal award from a
federal fund set up to compensate victims or calling
one of the many lawyers who had sent what Mrs.
Cottom calls “advertising packages” and filing a
lawsuit.

One of those lawyers, Mary Schiavo, a former
inspector general for the federal Department of
Transportation, visited her at home and convinced
Mrs. Cottom that her instincts were right, that Asia
deserved much more than what the government would
offer.

“She came to me and convinced me that she could
bring justice to the situation, and I trusted what
she said,” Mrs. Cottom recalled. When government
compensation for deaths was eventually made, the
average was $2 million, and the range was $250,000
to $7.1 million.

Now, in a concrete sign of movement in the families’
cases, the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal
District Court in Manhattan, has set a trial date of
Sept. 24 — 2,205 days since 19 hijackers brought
four planes out of the sky into the twin towers, the
Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

By the plaintiffs’ own accounts, they have sued with
mixed motives, which sometimes even they cannot
untangle. They present themselves as heroes fighting
for the truth and as families honoring the memory of
their loved ones, but they are not apologetic about
seeking money. They seem to be an angry, stubborn,
sorrowful and stalwart group, who have been little
known by most Americans, or perhaps forgotten with
the passage of time.

Of the original 95 lawsuits on behalf of 96 victims,
53 cases have been settled, one has been dismissed
and 41 cases remain to be resolved, according to
court papers. Those 41 cases represent 42 victims,
including 10 who were injured. But settlement talks
continue, and more cases could be settled before the
trials begin.

The plaintiffs are people like Mike Low, whose
28-year-old daughter, Sara, was a flight attendant
on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to
crash into the World Trade Center. For Mr. Low, it
is strange for the airlines to deny that they could
have anticipated the attacks, because, he says, his
daughter was offered antiterrorist insurance as one
of her fringe benefits, and took it.

Or John E. Keating, who has only a plastic bank
card, retrieved from the Fresh Kills landfill, where
debris from the twin towers site was being sifted,
to show for the mortal remains of his 72-year-old
mother, Barbara, who was also on board Flight 11.

“You become obsessed by it,” said Mr. Keating, a
software developer who lives in Toronto. “The last
40 minutes of her life, I guess that story needs to
be told, or acknowledged. In my mind I see her in a
seat at the back of the plane, praying for strength
because her faith was a big part of her life, and if
she was comforting someone who needed comforting, I
can certainly see that.”

In a reversal of the usual legal procedure, Judge
Hellerstein has ordered six trials for damages to
take place before any trial for liability, in the
hope, he said, that both sides may use those figures
as a road map toward settlement. He set dates for
two of those damages trials, Sept. 24 and Oct. 15.

His decision is a mixed victory for the plaintiffs,
since it means that the trials, though likely to be
extremely emotional, will lack many of the findings
of accountability that the families say they so
dearly want. The trials will focus instead on the
victims’ pain and suffering and on the grief of
their surviving families.

“It will be a somewhat sterile type of environment
to try these cases in,” said Keith S. Franz, of
Azrael, Gann & Franz, which is handling five of the
remaining cases.

Still, the grief of the survivors is powerful. Mr.
Low, the self-made owner of a small limestone mining
company in Batesville, Ark., sometimes wears a
silver and lapis lazuli ring he gave to his daughter
that was found in the wreckage.

While waiting for his case to get to court, he has
learned from F.B.I. records that his daughter gave
her childhood home phone number to another flight
attendant to make a hasty call to a friend to report
the hijacking.

Sara Low had just moved to a new apartment, and her
father imagines that in the stress of the hijacking,
she gave the flight attendant, Amy Sweeney, the only
number she could remember, one that reached back to
her childhood in Arkansas.

The plaintiffs point to box-cutters carried by the
hijackers as evidence of lapses in airport security.
To further support their contention that the
airlines could have been more vigilant, they cite,
in their master liability complaint, a 1999 Federal
Aviation Administration report saying Osama bin
Laden had “implied” that he could use a
shoulder-fired missile to shoot down a military
passenger aircraft.

Lawyers for the defendants in the coming damages
trials — United and American Airlines; airport
security companies; Boeing, the aircraft
manufacturer; and others — say the lawsuits are
misguided, that the aviation industry played by the
government rules at the time, and that the
terrorists knew what they could get away with.

“We strongly believe the aviation defendants are not
to be blamed for terrorist attacks on the country,”
Joseph F. Wayland, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher &
Bartlett, said for the defense group as whole.

Still, they recognize this is not an ordinary
product liability case, filled with obscure
technical details, but one of the most studied
episodes in history, recorded in the voluminous and
exhaustive 9/11 Commission report, news media
accounts and even the Central Intelligence Agency’s
report released last month, detailing the agency’s
missteps before the attacks.

Those reports, very much in the public domain, will
be the elephant in the room, as Donald A. Migliori,
a lawyer with Motley Rice, said. “If you put every
actor who in part or in whole allowed the events of
9/11 to happen in this courtroom, and take each of
their respective shares of responsibility and
aggregate it, you have 100 percent liability,” he
said. “What is the number that you come up with?”

The defendants say they trust that the judge will
keep those ghosts out of the courtroom.

Most of the families are represented by Motley Rice,
an aggressive law firm based in South Carolina.
Motley Rice, known for its tobacco, lead paint and
asbestos litigation, initially represented 53 cases,
and still has 30 after settlements.

Ms. Schiavo, who is a frequent television
commentator on aviation disasters and terrorism, now
works for Motley Rice and brought 44 of the 9/11
cases with her. In addition, Motley Rice had signed
up nine on its own.

The plaintiffs acknowledge that the biggest
difference between the two sides is over the value
of pain and suffering. Economic losses are
calculated by a mathematical model, and the margin
for dispute is relatively small.

If there is anything that characterizes many of the
remaining holdouts in the lawsuits, their lawyers
acknowledge, it is that they tend to be people who
would not have received high awards from the federal
government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund
— children, retirees, single people without
dependents.

Pain and suffering is another matter, more
ineffable. The Sept. 11th fund awarded a flat rate
of $250,000 for pain and suffering for each person
who died in the attacks, and another $100,000 each
to surviving spouses and children.

Congress created the Victim Compensation Fund within
days of the attacks, to protect the airlines from
financial ruin by discouraging lawsuits. People who
filed by Dec. 22, 2003, had to relinquish their
right to sue.

The fund paid $6 billion to survivors of 2,880 of
those killed in the attacks, representing 97 percent
of the families of the dead, according to its final
report.

But in the mathematical model of the fund, despite
the discretion exercised by its special master,
Kenneth R. Feinberg, the economic losses of a child
like Asia Cottom, whose dream of being a doctor was
harshly interrupted before anyone could know whether
she would realize it, could not compare with those
of a stockbroker leaving behind a spouse and
children.

Mrs. Cottom, a branch chief for civil rights at the
Department of Agriculture, and her husband, on the
staff at Choice Academy, an alternative school in
Washington, had taken out life insurance on their
daughter, because they thought it was the
responsible thing to do. The compensation fund
deducted death benefits like life insurance from any
award.

The Cottoms’ lawyers would not say how much Asia
might have received from the fund. Mrs. Cottom said
she believed they would have received little more
than the minimum $250,000 — an amount she found
“insulting.”

She lost a daughter, she said, who had her first
menstrual period just before the fatal flight, a
school trip to Los Angeles. “I took her to Wal-Mart
to buy sanitary napkins,” Mrs. Cottom said. “So she
was growing up one day and the next day she’s gone.”

Her decision to reject the fund was not hard, she
said. “To me, it just smelled of dishonesty. How do
you justify, O.K., an 11-year-old is worth $2, but
because you’re the pilot of that plane, that’s worth
$2 million?”

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